If Only
by LightningPage
Summary: "'If only's were for children. Elsa should know that better than anyone." Or, five times Elsa misses Anna and one time she doesn't have to.


Elsa was ten.

And Olaf was misshapen.

For one thing, he didn't have any carrots or coal, though Elsa had tried to make do with ice spun out of her fingertips, poked and prodded into reluctant pointed noses and chipped, spherical buttons. When the time came to it she wanted branches for his arms, too, but that was out of the question—she hadn't gone outside since she was eight years old and didn't dare, not even now under the protective coat of winter. In the end, she ended up leaving the poor snowman armless and feeding ice out of her fingertips to smooth down the ridged roughness of his snowy skin.

A more sinister touch of ice was prodding at her restraint. She hurriedly ended her project and, blowing on her fingers, stepped back to drink it all in.

Olaf just didn't look right.

Elsa had been working on the little snowman for roughly half of the day, and now that, _knock knock knock_, there was her father rapping gently on her door's thick wood, she waved a hand, sending Olaf tumbling to a crumbly doom on the floor. The telltale darkness of ice in her fingers accompanied it, so that when her father slipped in a flash freeze had swallowed her room.

Olaf hadn't been perfect, but daring to build him had been the bravest thing she'd done in two years. Of course, she thought bitterly as her father knelt beside her, taking her hands gently in his, she knew what was missing. Not the branches, not the carrot, not the coal—the snowman, Elsa thought, needed an undeniable touch of _Anna_.

But when her and her father's eyes met, she knew somewhere deep in her gut that Anna just wasn't an option. Because while Olaf was melting fast underneath their feet, the feeling of her father slipping a new pair of gloves on reminded her that there wasn't to be any melting of the icy wall between her and her sister.

And there never could be.

It just wasn't a choice.

* * *

Elsa was eleven.

Supper in the royal hall was only once a week for Elsa, whose parents had told the staff that she would rather receive meals in her room. However, when it came about, it was a cause for terror.

Don't freeze your tea, and don't freeze your silverware. Smile when looked at, and don't take your gloves off even to test out your soup. Keep your eyes on the table, and most importantly, don't even look at Anna.

These rules passed in an unspoken intensity between her and her parents, all three apprehensively nibbling at their generous courses and sipping their stews in carefully measured swallows as Anna talked enough to fill the frozen room with sunlight. In the earlier years, Anna would playfully bump her underneath the table, but as the years melted by and the ice intensified behind the silk of her gloves, physical contact between the sisters slimmed to nonexistant.

When dinner petered out to a stubborn end, it was always a cause for relief. Elsa could stand and calmly slide her untouched dinner away from her and curtsy when her parents excused her. When she turned the corner into the hallway, she would then flee to her room and slam the door, an inundation of snow immediately soaking the lacquered tiles. But she could deal with snow—sometimes Elsa thought she would even take a snowstorm, just as long as Anna wasn't there.

But that night as she hurried away from the dinner table, hands clenched at her sides, the sound of eager footsteps, heavy and graceless, pattered after her. Elsa instinctively twisted her fingers, hard, into her immaculately smooth gown and began to up her flight up the long, curving stairwell, but the footsteps were growing almost as loud as her erratic heartbeat and she had never been able to outrun her sister, not even with her longer legs and her competetive streak—

Anna's fingers—so warm, almost scalding—glanced off of her elbow, and Elsa jumped, fingers fumbling for the support of the railing. Dread coalescing like an ice-coated snowball in her stomach, she slowly turned her head as if to face the inevitable.

"Hi." Anna was eight to Elsa's eleven, and her eyes were full of hope and the blueness of a summer sea. "Want to play dolls? Papa told me that I could play dolls after dinner, and he doesn't usually let me do that, so I figure it should be special." She absently tugged at one of her pigtails and a smile flowed onto her face as easily as melted snow. "And I've got four dolls, too, so that's two for each of us. What do you say?"

Elsa's heart fluttered in her chest. (She thought of slipping her gloves off, of letting it go, of letting Anna tug her down the staircase just as she always used to. But then she thought of Olaf, Olaf in her wintery bedroom, Olaf in the dark corner of a frozen ballroom, crumbling, melting—gone.)

"Anna," she said, taking a deep, wobbly breath. "I'm sorry. But not tonight."

Her sister's eyebrow's knit. "Why not?"

"I just—" Ice was slithering into the rug beneath her feet, and frost spiraling in intricate swirls on the posts flanking the stairwell—"I just can't, all right?"

She pivoted and prepared to launch into her desperate flight to her room, (heart flapping wildly like a butterfly in its death throes) when Anna reached for her hand, and closed on the glove's silken blue fabric and the tiniest inch of pale-frosted skin seeped out—

"_No_!"

She didn't realize how loud her cry was until Anna leaped back, eyes wide and wary and full of a bitterly familiar emotion.

It was fear. And no matter how slight it was, Elsa went every day seeing that expression in her own eyes. She couldn't bear to see it in Anna's.

Elsa shook her head, hand suddenly over her mouth. She thought she might be sick. "I'm sorry," she heard herself murmur faintly, and then turned on Anna, gown grazing her across the ankles, and finally—_finally_—she was able to hurl herself up the stairs, to stumble her clumsy way around the corner and to the door with the tiny snowflakes inscribed onto the pale paint, and throw herself in, pristine grace and manners all but abandoned on the stairwell with her sister. But as she slammed the door and sank to the suddenly icy floor, she did not feel any better. Her tears froze on her cheeks and shattered prettily on the fresh frost below her, _plink, plink, plink_.

_Do you want to build a snowman_?

Elsa tilted her head back against the door and _ached_.

_I want to build a snowman. I really, really do._

It just wasn't a choice she could make.

It never had been.

* * *

Elsa was thirteen.

And outside, Anna was building a snowman.

"Do you need anything?" Her father had just brought her breakfast, a silver tray weighted down with a heaping mass of delicacies that they both knew she would never touch. "Anything at all?"

A headache pounded like a tribal drum behind her weary eyes. Elsa pinched her nose and gave a small shake of the head.

She felt her father's hesitant smile somewhere above her head. "Well. If you do, tell me. I will be in my study."

There's a small stretch of silence, and then he quietly sighs, (though not quietly enough not to be heard by his daughter), and slips out of the room. He softly closes the door with a _click._

Elsa ground her palms into her eyes and forced them to open, rubbing the sleep grit out of the corners. She peered at her breakfast through her fingers. Two slices of bread, along with a jam preserve and a cake of marmalade. A bunch of rich purple grapes. A bowl of oatmeal, gracefully dusted in a light frost of brown sugar. A mug of gently steaming tea.

Breakfast from yesterday hadn't sat, and her stomach had roiled in a nauseous state throughout the day. Now that she thought about it, she _was _rather hungry.

Taking shaky draughts of breath, Elsa took hold of a knife in her left hand, a fork in her right. She chose to ignore the frosty sheen creeping up the shiny metallic surface placed the silverware perfectly on either side of the plate.

Then, steadying herself, she reached out for the grapes.

And the moment her fingers brushed against the plate, a flash freeze leapt from her fingers and greedily swallowed the grapes. She instinctively jerked away, nearly spilling over from her chair, but it was too late—ice was spreading in cracks along the uneven wood of her desk, shattering the tub the marmalade was sitting in and upsetting the gooey orange liquid all over the floor, creeping in curls of sleet in the bowl of oatmeal, and powdering even the bread in a stark, glaring white—

"Stop," she commanded it, and when it would not stop, leaping from her fingers like joyful hissing sparks and tumbling over the table, she yelped, "_Stop_!"

Outside, Anna laughed, high and bright and fleeting.

And, slowly but surely, the ice hissed to a reluctant halt.

Elsa pressed the cold pads of her fingertips to her forehead, struggling to concentrate on her breaths. When that failed to calm her, she kicked back her chair and crossed in three quick steps to the window, where if she squinted, she could see a head of strawberry-blonde braids bobbing in a telltale fashion over by the garden. A flash of summer-sea eyes. And the slow formation of a snowman.

_Conceal it, don't feel it, Elsa._

But it was just so hard, when Anna was two floors away but still somehow so close.

_Slow down!_

_ Catch me!_

_ ANNA!_

_ (And the little girl shouted at the flash of ice darting across her head, and she tumbled down, down, down, to where not even Elsa could catch her—)_

Elsa jumped, and her fingers slammed unexpectedly into the cold window glass. A flood of frost collapsed from somewhere inside her skin and clouded across the window, blurring Anna's glowingly happy face.

Elsa simply stared where Anna's face had once been, for a mere breath of a second just _wishing_, before she sighed. Even she couldn't see through frost, after all.

She slid down from the windowsill, and with a slight air of wistfulness tugged the curtains shut so that her room was tossed into darkness.

It wasn't like she had a choice, after all.

* * *

Elsa was sixteen.

And today, Anna was turning thirteen.

And while she watched their father spin Anna away from him, and then to him, her sister tripping all the while practically over her own shoes, Elsa sat as stiffly as an ice sculpture at the table, moving only to sip her tea. She didn't dare to do anything else. She hardly dared to breathe, because, after all, they all knew what had happened the last time she and Anna had been in the ballroom together—

Her mother's fingers, so slim and elegant and carrying just the right amount of motherly tenderness, brushed against her shoulders. Her whole body automatically coiled like a spring, in contradiction to her mother's soft words:

"_Relax_."

Elsa's lips pressed tightly together, and she mechanically polished off the dregs of her tea. Her mother's hand roved delicately through her hair, though every molecule inside Elsa's tightly strung body was screaming to push her off, push her _away_. "It means so much to Anna that you came," Idun whispered. "It's the best present you could have given." A soft squeeze of the shoulder. "Relax."

Elsa, almost imperceptibly, nodded. A wave of relief coursed over her mother's porcelain features, and her hand ghosted over the tightly wrapped bun of her hair in lieu of a kiss before she settled herself down next to her daughter.

"Whoa, hey, you too!" Anna swirled clumsily over to their mother with all the elegance and fluidity of a drunk, and with a tug of a hand pulled her out of her chair before she could do anything but cast a helpless glance over to Elsa.

If only, Elsa thought as she drank in the laughing, happy family in the center of the dance floor, things had been different. If only what had happened in the ballroom all those long years ago could be erased out of memory just as easily as snowball fights and snowmen and wintery castles out of childhood dreams, conjured with the flick of a finger in this very ballroom, had been erased out of Anna's. If only a price could be paid for the withdrawal of her powers, for the return of emotion.

If only she had the chance to be born a different person, born without this damned _curse_—

"Elsa!"

Anna had seemingly materialized in front of her, dress still spinning, cheeks flushed, and eyes kindling bright with warmth. Elsa stared up at her incomprehensively before she realized that one of her sister's freckled arms were extended to her, as if she were expected to merrily hook her arm into hers and spiral off onto the dance floor.

Her heart was suddenly in her mouth. She distractedly smiled. "No thank you, Anna."

"C'mon. I won't even go that fast. Well, I can't really promise that…like, at all…but—"

Elsa abruptly stood, slightly throwing Anna off balance, and smoothed down the wrinkles in her dress. "That was fun. Thank you, Anna," she addressed the floor. "I think I'll be retiring now. Happy birthday."

And she left Anna alone by the small table by the door, hand extended to nothing, and hurried out of that wretched _room _as quickly as possible with her head held high, dress unwrinkled, and not a hair out of place.

Of course, she thought as she climbed the long, lonely staircase, 'if only's were for children. Elsa should know that better than anyone; she had been turning all the countless 'if only's in her life over in her head for eight years.

She can't afford to be a child anymore.

She can't afford to even wish.

She can't afford to have a choice.

* * *

"_Princess Elsa—I'm terribly sorry to inform you—Princess Elsa, I am so sorry, but there was a massive storm out at sea…we haven't heard anything from your parents' ship…I'm terribly sorry…"_

Crumbling. Melting. Going. Going. Gone.

* * *

Elsa is eighteen.

The singing of a mourning people drifted up to Elsa from the river of candles flowing steadily in the direction of the two tall black graves. The two tall black graves flanking the small figure in the middle, head bent and shawl pulled up to conceal the fact that not long ago, summer-sea blue eyes had wept.

Ignoring her or pushing her out of her mind was no longer even a choice. Elsa knelt on her windowsill just as she had done when she was a child, and when she gently touched the glass, the ice that resulted spun out into intricate, swirling patterns that encompassed the whole window except for Anna's face, so small, so hopeless.

Strains of her mother's favorite song crept in trickles through the open crack in the window.

_Paa solen jeg ser, det lider alt frem, snart ar det ved hømessetide…_

This time there was no Olaf to build, nothing to refuse, nothing to freeze, nothing to wish. There was only Anna, and the sadness that Elsa could practically see shivering like a magnetic field between the two sisters.

_O, den, som en stund fik ønske sig hjem blandt folk, som paa kirkevej skride…_

There was only regret, and a palpable 'if only' that Elsa felt in the room as strongly as if it were a material person.

_Naar solskiven stiger lidt, saa den staar der midt over skaret i kammen…_

There was only a lifetime of opportunities that she'd wished she had taken, a lifetime of chances that she had declined no matter how many times Anna had tried to show her that yes, there _was _a choice.

Had there always been?

Maybe. But not for her, and not anymore.

_Da ved jeg, i dalen klokkerne garr, da ringer fra taarnet det sammen._

* * *

**.**

**.**

**.**

* * *

Elsa is twenty-one.

"Elsa-a-a-a."

Elsa glanced up from her seemingly endless paperwork to see her younger sister standing in the door frame, hip cocked to one side and utterly exasperated. She lowered her head over her desk to hide the smile steadily creeping up her lips. "Yes, Anna, what is it?"

"Oh, nothing." The redhead casually flounced over to Elsa's desk, where she plunked herself firmly on the corner. "It's just that my sister said she would come and play in the snow _forever _ago and I just strolled in here to find that she's still trying to tackle all her boring paperwork."

"Hmmm." Elsa dipped her quill into the fountain of ink. "You don't seem to be dressed for a day outside."

Anna smiled slyly and nudged her sister's knee with her foot. "I don't need to."

Elsa paused to raise an ever-elegant eyebrow at Anna.

"Come on!" Anna cupped her hand over her ear and leaned slightly aside, as if she were intently listening to something. "I think I hear the ballroom calling…yes, that's definitely the ballroom." She practically surged off of Elsa's desk, spinning fluidly to lock both of her palms on the wood and look her older sister seriously in the eyes. "Come _on_. You _promised_. Plus, the sky is totally awake, so that means we—"

"We have to play. I know." Elsa sighed, and glanced outside. Oh, well. It wasn't really _that _late, after all. Besides, she knew what choice she favored over paperwork.

"All right. But we'll have to be quiet about it, I think Kai and Gerda both went to bed—"

But Anna is already grabbing her hand and practically dragging her out into the hallway, summer-sea blue eyes flashing with triumph, and Elsa would tell her to slow down if she hadn't caught the infectiousness of Anna's smile and the brightness of her eager laugh. Without any hesitation, Anna pulls her into the ballroom, where they both labor to shut the door before running in.

And Anna doesn't have to say 'do the magic' this time, because Elsa has been waiting for this moment for thirteen years and doesn't even need to be offered a choice, not this time.

"You ready?"

Anna's grin practically lights up the whole room.

"Of course!"

And Elsa is ten, she is eleven, she is thirteen, she is sixteen, and she is eighteen, all in the span of a couple of seconds, but this time, she knows, is different.

She is twenty-one, and she has made her choice.

(And so she throws the snowball up in the air, and as Anna laughs, Elsa catches the spark and begins to laugh too, and somewhere in her mind Olaf uprights himself with a new twinkle in his eye.)

* * *

**well look who caught the frozen bug again.**...

***nobody is surprised***

**i dunno. this was mainly written to try to kick writer's block in the face. and because I needed some sisterly fluff:)**

**ALSO. the song that the mourners are singing during the funeral is called Sæterjentens Søndag and from what i got from the english translation (and from the explanation of the lyrics that was kindly provided) it's about the loneliness of girls who are sent up to the high pastures to care for and tend the sheep. i'm sure you were especially interested about that.**

**Anyway, please tell me what you think of it and thanks for reading!**


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